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Traditionally, war powers have resided with Congress -- or so the Constitutional story goes. It's been a long time, of course, since that's been a reality, but over the last few decades American wars have become ever more purely and starkly presidential in nature. Last year, in a situation of open armed intervention in Libya, President Obama declined to seriously discuss the matter with Congress, or even abide by the more recent War Powers Resolution of 1973. And that was for our most recent "overt" war. The "covert" ones (which, by the way, in a new definition of that term, are regularly in the news and amount to bragging points in an election year) are now purely presidential -- from the ongoing full-scale drone war in Pakistan to more minor versions of the same in Yemen and Somalia. The president even picks the individual targets of the attacks himself. The same was true of the Special Operations Forces raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden. War in all its aspects is increasingly the president's private domain, not a matter for either Congress, or certainly the American people.

In recent years, in one of the more dangerous, if largely undiscussed, developments of our time, the Bush and then Obama administrations have launched the first state-planned war in cyber space (in conjunction with the Israelis), until recently utterly secret and purely by presidential fiat. The target: Iran, its nuclear program, and banks outside that country that may be helping the Iranians launder their money. First, there were the "Olympic Games," then the Stuxnet virus, then Flame, and now it turns out that other sophisticated malware programs have evidently followed. This "war" was launched not just preemptively, but essentially on the basis of Dick Cheney's infamous 1% doctrine (even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty). Once again, as with drones, the White House is setting the global rules of the road for every country (and group) able to get its hands on such weaponry.

Can you be in a war involving weapons of mass destruction and not know it? The answer: indeed you can -- and we are. Now, American officials are suddenly raising the alarm that malefactors (like Iran) might already be doing smaller scale versions of the same to us with potentially disastrous results (since we are perhaps more dependent on computer systems and the world of the Internet than any country on the planet). After all, cyber war does potentially involve the use of weapons of mass destruction in the most literal sense, as TomDispatch regular Karen J. Greenberg makes clear in today's post. And even if no cyber apocalypse hits, Greenberg vividly lays out how fear of it is likely to be used to further locking down "the homeland." Tom

Will the Apocalypse Arrive Online? How Fear of Cyber Attack Could Take Down Your Liberties and the Constitution By Karen J. Greenberg

First the financial system collapses and it's impossible to access one's money. Then the power and water systems stop functioning. Within days, society has begun to break down. In the cities, mothers and fathers roam the streets, foraging for food. The country finds itself fractured and fragmented -- hardly recognizable.

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It may sound like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie or the first episode of NBC's popular new show "Revolution," but it could be your life -- a nationwide cyber-version of Ground Zero.

Think of it as 9/11/2015. It's Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's vision of the future -- and if he's right (or maybe even if he isn't), you better wonder what the future holds for erstwhile American civil liberties, privacy, and constitutional protections.

Last week, Panetta addressed the Business Executives for National Security, an organization devoted to creating a robust public-private partnership in matters of national security. Standing inside the Intrepid, New York's retired aircraft-carrier-cum-military-museum, he offered a hair-raising warning about an imminent and devastating cyber strike at the sinews of American life and wellbeing.

Yes, he did use that old alarm bell of a "cyber Pearl Harbor," but for anyone interested in American civil liberties and rights, his truly chilling image was far more immediate. "A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states or violent extremist groups," he predicted, "could be as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11."

Panetta is not the first Obama official to warn that the nation could be facing a cyber catastrophe, but he is the highest-ranking to resort to 9/11 imagery in doing so. Going out on a limb that previous cyber doomsayers had avoided, he mentioned September 11th four times in his speech, referring to our current vulnerabilities in cyber space as "a pre-9/11 moment."

Apocalypse Soon

Since the beginning of the Obama presidency, warnings of cyber menaces from foreign enemies and others have flooded the news. Politicians have chimed in, as have the experts -- from respected security professionals like President George Bush's chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke to security policymakers on the Hill like Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins. Even our no-drama president has weighed in remarkably dramatically on the severity of the threat. "Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency. And as we've seen in past blackouts, the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities, and entire regions to a standstill."

Panetta's invocation of 9/11 was, however, clearly meant to raise the stakes, to sound a wake up call to the business community, Congress, and the nation's citizens. The predictions are indeed frightening. According to the best experts, the consequences of a massive, successful cyber attack on crucial U.S. systems could be devastating to life as we know it.

It's no longer just a matter of intellectual property theft, but of upending the life we lead. Imagine this: instead of terrorists launching planes at two symbolic buildings in the world's financial center, cyber criminals, terrorists, or foreign states could launch viruses into major financial networks via the Internet, or target the nation's power grids, robbing citizens of electricity (and thus heat in the middle of winter), or disrupt the systems that run public transportation, or contaminate our water supply.

Any or all of these potential attacks, according to leading cyber experts, are possible. Though they would be complex and difficult operations, demanding technical savvy, they are nonetheless within the realm of present possibility. Without protections, American citizens could be killed outright (say on a plane or a train) or left, as the president warned, without food, fuel, water and the mechanisms for transacting daily business.